The Bad Influence

A conversation I overheard as a kid—and the sentence I’ve been trying to understand for almost fifty years.

There is a conversation I overheard almost fifty years ago that I still remember.

I was probably in sixth grade, maybe a little older. My friend Suzy had become friends with another girl named Cheryl, and the three of us started hanging around together. I don’t remember particularly liking Cheryl. What I did like was that her mother worked, which meant we could go to her house after school and there were no adults around.

Her mother was divorced and raising the kids herself. Cheryl also had an older sister who, from what I remember, was real bad news. Cheryl herself wasn’t exactly a great influence on me either. She was the reason I tried shoplifting.

But that isn’t the part I’ve remembered all these years.

One day I called her house. Her mother answered. “No, we’re eating dinner,” she said, and hung up.

Honestly, looking back, I’m a little surprised they were all sitting down eating dinner together. That isn’t how I remember that house. I must not have understood that the conversation was over, because I called back. Before the phone even rang, her mother picked up the receiver to take it off the hook. Except somehow I could hear them talking. I assumed they were sitting at the dinner table.

Then I heard her mother say, “Cheryl, don’t drop Suzy for that Kate.”

She said it again. “Don’t drop Suzy for that Kate. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you,” Cheryl said.

That is all I remember. I may have hung up immediately, but I have wondered what she meant for almost fifty years. Was I the Kate she was talking about? Did she think Cheryl was going to drop Suzy for me? Did she just like Suzy better? Or was there something about me she didn’t like?

For some reason, even then, I wondered whether she knew something about my family. Adults knew things. They talked about other families and had opinions about other people’s kids, and the kids usually had no idea. Did she think I was a bad influence?

If she did, that’s the funny part. She had it completely backward. Cheryl was the one who got me to try shoplifting. Later she started getting into drugs, and that was eventually one of the reasons I stopped being friends with her. I have no idea what happened to her after that.

I still don’t know what her mother meant. Maybe “that Kate” wasn’t even me. I just know that, of everything I’ve forgotten from those years, I can still hear her mother saying it twice and Cheryl answering, “Yes, I hear you.” Why my brain decided to hang on to that particular conversation for nearly fifty years, I have no idea.

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